


He Will Eventually

by EllyAvon



Series: Love is Not a Game (Or: The Tennis Metaphor Has Consequences) [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Awkwardness, Ceiling Vent Clint Barton, Clint Feels, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, M/M, Multi, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Past Rape/Non-con, Pre-Slash, SHIELD, Underage Rape/Non-con, Underage Sex, young!Clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-25
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-04-17 03:38:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4650837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllyAvon/pseuds/EllyAvon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint has never played a game of tennis. That wouldn’t make any difference, except for the fact that’s he’s built a load-bearing wall of his sanity out of a Tennis-related metaphor. Not, probably, his best decision, but he didn’t really do it on purpose. </p><p>OR: How Clint comes to be at SHIELD, his first two weeks in training, and coming to the realization that maaaaybe he shouldn't be in long-term relationships.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Will Eventually

**Author's Note:**

> The non-con in this is not graphic, but it is underage and it is traumatic for poor Clint, and will impact him throughout the story arc. In fact, the whole story arc is about how he handles sex, relationships and the attached emotions. So, please be kind to yourself and be aware of your own triggers. It's maybe over-tagged, but I'd rather be safe than have people have a bad experience. Please let me know if you have questions.
> 
> I took a lot of liberties with timelines and facts (inasmuch as things *can* be facts in comic book land). Most of my info comes from 616 and/or MCU plus a healthy dose of the Avengers Assemble kids' TV show, Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (GO READ IT RIGHT NOW), and Secret Avengers. So, basically whatever I want, ha ha ha. Thanks Marvel!

Clint has never played a game of tennis. That wouldn’t make any difference, except for the fact that’s he’s built a load-bearing wall of his sanity out of a Tennis-related metaphor. Not, probably, his best decision, but he didn’t really do it on purpose.

Clint saw his first round of tennis on an old TV in the bearded lady’s trailer when he was twelve.

One person scores, the other person has nothing.

They call that Fifteen-Love.

Other people say it’s special. There’s a thousand songs and stories about love and sex. Clint doesn’t really understand any of them, when he starts using the metaphor. He doesn’t understand Tennis, either, so it kind of works out.

So, he figures, sex is somewhat like tennis. Just a paired activity in which people take from one another. Score against one another. Try to keep each other in love.

Hey, it’s not a perfect metaphor, but he's young and kinda traumatized, so it works for him.

The Swordsman gets him a little drunk and maybe a little drugged and has his way with him when he’s almost fourteen. It’s horrible, strange, unpleasant, wet. And it hurts. Bad.

It’s far, far easier to think about losing at a game than losing other things, like his privacy, his innocence, his virginity-- those things hurt to think about. Losing at a game he’s only played once? That’s easier to wrap his newly-teenaged brain around. It hurts a shit-ton less.

That night, he climbs dizzily up to the high wire stand with his first bow, and tries to hit the popcorn pieces left on the floor. He shoots all but one of his dozen arrows. He hits five pieces of popcorn from forty feet up. He stays there, sticky, with tears creeping down his cheeks. He stays awake and very still.

Fifteen-love, just a game, he tells himself.

(It’s the first of hundreds of nights Clint will spend with a weapon trained on a doorway.)

It’s a little later that year when he’s fumbling around with the acrobats’ daughter, who’s two years older than he is. It’s still strange, but far less unpleasant. It doesn’t hurt him, but it seems to hurt her. He doesn’t like that. She goes from all flushed and handsy to weeping and cringing. Clint gets the feeling she lost that round, somehow, but he doesn’t feel particularly good about it. He’s not sure he won, really. He’s left alone behind the trailer in the grass without his pants.

Just a game.

Clint doesn’t have a great batting average (he knows vaguely that’s the wrong sport, but again, he knows very little about _actual_ tennis) until he learns to spot a drugged drink from fifty paces. He desperately develops the ability to stay upright, fighting, and somewhat conscious while intoxicated.

But the Swordsman seems determined. Anyone who’s a master at anything is at their very core a persistent person. Clint shouldn’t be surprised when he drugs his food, knocks him out cold, takes advantage when he’s near-dead with influenza, and threatens to tell Ringmaster he’s been stealing. It's true, Clint picks the pockets of the wealthiest looking patrons; the blackmail is difficult to fight. Some nights, it’s just easier to go quietly, and being drugged or drunk makes it less painful.

Fifteen-Love, just a game.

He’s fifteen the last time the Swordsman attempts to touch him without his express permission. His aim has gone from unnaturally good, to excellent, to ruthlessly exacting. He shoots an arrow straight through his hand, pinning the little packet of powder to the wall with his hand. Ringmaster is furious with both of them, but not furious enough to make either of them leave.

He calls that one fifteen-fifteen. Still just a game.

After that, he’s pretty safe.

By seventeen, Clint can do most of the acts in the Circus-- does a lot of them, actually. He has wigs and costumes so that he can do a minor part in the trapeze act, throw knives at Jayjay the clown, gives Anya a stand on which to do her contortion (apparently her contortion is far more impressive if it’s done on Clint’s bare feet while he himself is doing and handstand or some other bizarre pose). And of course, his trick shots. Most people probably thought there were four separate young men doing these jobs.

Agent Phil Coulson of the Strategic Homeland Intervention and Enforcement Logistics Division (Gesundheit) sees that it’s just him, right away. Clint can tell from where he’s bent over in a bridge, with Anya balanced on the flat of his stomach. He usually takes his time to look into the crowd during this part of the act, and sees the Agent immediately. He’s got sharp blue eyes and his clothes are spotlessly clean. He’s definitely armed and Clint wants to fight him, just to see if he can win. He clearly is not here to see the greatest show on Earth.

When Agent Coulson finds him after the show, the first thing he asks is if he’s eighteen. Clint says nineteen, because he doesn’t have any paperwork anyway, and he gets the feeling that being of age is important. Agent Coulson asks if he wants to leave the circus and save the world on occasion. Clint nods dumbly, wide eyed, and the agent advises that he'll come back to tomorrow night's show with a real recruiter.

Clint is not an idiot. He hasn’t been to school in about six years, but he’s not an idiot. No one has ever come back for him when they said they would. He tries desperately not to get his hopes up, even as he wants so badly to leave this place, wants so badly to do something with his life, and, strangely he finds he wants so badly to just see the man in the suit again.

Clint is legitimately surprised when he does return the next night with a thin, dark haired woman with similarly arresting eyes. Agent Maria Hill sees what he can do, and offers him a job.

Clint’s lived with his alcoholic dad, in a shitty orphanage, and at a circus that’s turned him into something graceful and lethal and somewhat wrong in the head. He wants to ask a lot of questions, like _Will there be food? Can I have my own bed? Am I really going to kill people?_ and _Will anybody try to touch me?_

Clint only verbalizes two questions, though, 1) _Can he bring his bow?_ and 2) _When do they leave?_

The answers are _Yes,_ and _Thirty Minutes, Mr. Barton._

Clint figures he can shoot his way out if he really needs to.

He’s in a pack of twelve other probationary agents. The others seem to know what’s going on far more than he does-- he gets the vibe that he’s a last minute addition to the group. Thirteen is an uneven and unlucky number. A place that has people like Agent Coulson running around in it can’t have done that on purpose. But here he is anyway, and he’s equal parts elated and terrified.

They spend the first week going through a battery of physical tests. Clint imagines this is what the army must be like. They run them and have them swim laps and do jumping jacks and push ups and some horrible things called burpees. The rest of the group seem to be in good shape, too. He wonders where everybody else came from. He’s tired, but he still takes down everyone in his weight class when they spar at the end of each day.

(Over the course of his life, Clint will be taken down by _many_ people in the weight class above his, a sparse handful in his own weight class and just one in the weight class below. Her name will be Natasha Romanoff.)

On Friday, after they’ve run them absolutely ragged, they’re presented with the enormous obstacle course that takes up most of the courtyard of SHIELD’s massive Triskelion building. They get five minutes. Anyone who can’t do it is packing. Tonight.

Clint takes the thing in, and sees exactly what he needs. There’s a wire about an inch thick that runs the length of the thing. Maybe it’s meant for a different training exercise, maybe it’s part of the course, maybe it’s a leftover telephone cord. Whatever, it’s perfect. When the whistle blows, he climbs the 30 foot pole and walks deftly over the entire course. No net required.

Agent Coulson (who he hasn’t seen all week, and was decidedly not there when the whistle blew) is waiting for him at the bottom, an eyebrow arched and what might be a smirk on his face. He tells him good thinking, but sometimes the only way out is through. He sends him back to the beginning. He climbs the nets, scales the wall, crawls on his belly and jumps from post to post, and even though he had about a 38 second handicap, he makes it with 6.3 seconds to spare.

Two of the guys and one of the girls don’t make it through. Hey, scaling a wall is harder than it looks. It took years for Clint to learn.

He spends the next day learning how to assemble and care for a wide variety of guns. One of the other “probies” grumbles about working on a Saturday, and Clint thinks that’s kind of weird; he’s never not worked on Saturdays. He's also never fired a gun, and is a little apprehensive when they “get,” to try the guns out at the end of the day instead of sparring. Clint misses his first few shots, but once he gets used to the kickback and the way it feels in his hands, he can’t miss.

(He will miss, though, years from now, with a poorly-maintained and unfamiliar gun in the pouring rain at around midnight during a firefight in Budapest, Hungary.)

He sleeps for a lot of Sunday, eats with the others in his little pack, and works on learning the lay of the enormous headquarters. He’s getting used to the idea of staying here, since it seems he can do what they want him to do so far.

The next week does not go as well, in Clint’s opinion. They still exercise all morning and spar in the evening, but they start taking tests. Reading tests, tactical tests, math tests, and strange manipulative tests that some of the others don’t _realize_ are tests. Clint’s been picking pockets long enough to know when he’s a mark. At least he passes those ones. But, for the first time in his life, Clint regrets the fact that his education was-- spotty.

Agent Coulson calls him to his cube one day in the second week he's there. Clint can tell right away he's displeased, makes himself ready to bolt if he needs to. He's got a rudimentary go-bag hidden in a vent just down the hall. He'd hoped if they were going to cut him out that he’d get to say goodbye to Agent Coulson, and this kind of kills two birds with one stone.

But Agent Coulson only gives him another raised eyebrow and passes over a folder of papers. The very top thing is a certificate of live birth for one Clinton Francis Barton. He feels briefly dizzy, looking at the raised seal of the state of Iowa and the blanks filled in with actual information.

And, he realizes when Coulson taps a finger on his birthdate-- he's actually eighteen years old, and having your own knowledge of yourself corrected by a form is incredibly weird.

"Talk to me about this," he says, his voice cool but not accusing.

Clint examines Agent Coulson’s face. He can't be too much older than he is (now that he actually knows exactly how old he is). He’s definitely younger than thirty, probably mid twenties--he's plain, but not unattractive. He’s handsome, not hot. Clint doesn’t trust people who are overly attractive, and he’s starting to actually trust Agent Coulson. Aside from what he’s done for him, his cohort-mates tell him that Coulson is a well-known field agent who’s rising quickly through the ranks. He doesn't seem mad, at the moment. This isn’t a test or a forgery. It seems like he just wants to know. Clint trusts him more than he should and he's so thrown by this one flimsy piece of paper that he just blurts,

"Lots of-- um-- new intel?” he tries out the slang for the first time.

Coulson narrows his eyes, "such as?" He inquires drily.

“I didn't know my mom's name was Edith. I thought my birthday was in July. In a different year.” Coulson doesn’t need to know he’d thought it was the year after, not the year previous. “Knew it was the 18th of a J-month so at least I didn't think it was January? I have a middle name, but it's kind of a shitty one, apparently." He pauses and adds, "sir."

Coulson is not an expressive man, but now his eyebrows are almost up to the fringe of his sandy blond/brown hair.

"Nineteen was a good guess?" Clint offers weakly, then, after a long pause, "I was close." He was more than a year off. He was almost two years older than he thought he was.

The rest of the packet turns out to be a smattering of early medical records and report cards. There’s not much there. Clint was dismal at reading and excellent at math. Good at elementary music until he lost his hearing. The most interesting part is a single piece of notebook paper in a file from his second grade teacher. It's a page of notes. Each brief notation is dated, as though she was collecting observations for later use.

_Clinton is very bright. Clinton should be tested for dyslexia. Clinton appeared this morning with multiple contusions and lacerations. Clinton has been hoarding food in his cubby. Clinton should be fitted for a hearing aid. Clinton brought me a flower today. Clinton should receive tutoring to improve his comprehension. Clinton has not worn clean clothes in four days. Clinton is protective of his friends. I am concerned Clinton is not receiving the support he needs at home._

Clint feels like he should be upset that he doesn’t understand a lot of those words. It might be irony, but he’s not sure. He wonders if his life would have been different if this note had ended up somewhere else besides this empty little folder. He doesn't even know where it might have gone or what it was supposed to be for.

It’s a weird day, so Clint spends most of the rest of it in a vent. Clint can barely remember second grade, except that yes, that is when his hearing started to be bad. After his dad knocked him in the ear with an open palm.

His evals and tests come back and say he’s got a sixth grade reading level. Coulson makes a pinched face when Clint is pleased by this announcement. Clint’s excited because he never finished fourth grade, so reading at a sixth grade level is pretty exciting. He's also way behind on standard inoculations, he does have dyslexia, he is almost completely deaf in his right ear, and should have had reading glasses for a long time. If Coulson is disappointed with this, well, he probably shouldn’t have plucked him at random out of a circus, huh? But he figured out the math parts well enough and got the best score in the class on his tactical exam. And he still hasn’t missed with a gun or his bow. So, hopefully they’ll keep him.

They do keep him, in _style._

He has a serious discussion with Agents Coulson and Hill about whether he'd like laser surgery to fix his close-up vision, but everyone worries it might ruin his borderline super-powered far-off vision. They use fancier words than that, but Clint gets the gist. They also want to see if he'd be compatible for cochlear implant, but Clint doesn't want any kind of surgery. They have no problem fitting him with the smallest hearing aid he's ever seen, and letting him be.

So, damn, SHIELD is not fucking around. The circus took care of their own, to a certain extent, but this is a whole other level. For the first time since he was seven, Clint can hear everything, and that is kind of awesome. He doesn’t have to try to read lips anymore when people aren’t standing right next to him. He keeps it out sometimes, though. He can’t become dependent on the thing, after all.

It’s Agent Coulson himself who sits down with him twice a week to work on his reading skills. Clint is reticent at first-- he’s made it this far with the words he knows by sight. But Coulson wants Clint to learn other languages, wants him to not have to agonize over mission briefings and dossiers. Wants him to be a Specialist. His belief in him is a little overwhelming and it takes several months before Clint can sit after his reading lesson and actually talk to him. 

So, Clint learns more words, and lots of ways to get around his dyslexia. In English first, then in Spanish, then in German, then in French. Coulson is worried about his hearing and has Specialist Nielsen come in once a week to give them both ASL lessons. He sets to work on learning Russian-- he’d wanted to learn Arabic and Persian, but one of his cohort-mates points out that he’s “Aryan as all-fuck,” and Clint’s pretty sure that’s offensive somehow, but he learns Russian anyway.

(In his thirties, he will learn enough language stemming from the Middle East to be conversational in most major cities. He's desperately glad of this when one Agent Phillip J. Coulson goes missing in Shiraz, Iran. He and Natasha plot the unsanctioned extraction hiding in a women’s bathroom while dyeing their hair dark brown and whispering the works of Rumi to one another.)

He still doesn’t like reading very much, but he finds that he does like spying an awful lot.

He practices constantly, hiding in drop ceilings and in high places. He collects the gossip around the office and guards those secrets carefully. Sometimes he gets caught, because he works with a bunch of spies. He gets caught less and less as time goes by, or maybe people just get used to having him up there.

Clint also likes going out in the city and talking to strangers. He plays little games-- how many people can he get to tell him their mother's maiden name? How many people can he convince to follow him to another location? How many people will tell a stranger a secret? Lots, Clint finds. The number is more if he chooses marks who are already looking at him, and more still in certain places if his shirt doesn't have sleeves. He learns very quickly which places he needs a full shirt; hones the manners that were wildly unnecessary in the circus.

He spends a lot of time in the gym, a lot of time running and even more time in a flat plank position, high up out of sight. He’s muscular, lithe, has a strong jaw, big eyes and a fantastic ass (this is what he overheard some junior agents saying while they have lunch under the tree he's perched in. He has no reason not to believe them). It's not hard to find people to go home with, and even easier to get other agents to come back to his room with him, he finds. He’s with a variety of women and men in those years. It becomes more pleasant, warm even. People have fun playing tennis, too, sometimes even if they lose. He doesn’t leave any of his encounters at Fifteen-Love. Everybody scores. Even when things get awkward (and it's Clint and it's SHIELD, so it definitely gets awkward sometimes) it's still pretty good.

He starts dating Agent Tan for after several months of flirting. He falls for her a little bit when she looks straight up into the vent of their current events classroom, trains her sidearm on him and says “Get the fuck out of the vents, Barton.” She's got a wicked sense of humor, she's whip smart and not a bad shot, either. She would have been an Olympic gymnast if she’d been born in a different year (Clint catches on a little later that the Olympics only happen every four years, huh). They have fun remaking some of the tricks he used to do with Anya the contortionist and freaking out the rest of their cohort-mates.

At first, he thinks it's nice to have sex with someone more than once, but she notices that he's a little off about it. Notices that while she's lost somewhere else, he's still fully anchored. SHIELD agents have trust issues like other places have printers and fax machines, so she shouldn't be too surprised, Clint figures.

After almost a year, though, she wants something _more_ , and he has no concept of what that means. She tells him, as a few others have, that she wants to see him lose control, and give himself. Usually it’s the real dominant-types who want him mewling on the floor and begging for it, and he might have been into that, in another life. But he knows that isn’t quite what she wants. Clint is upset, because he’s told her some things about the Circus and she told him about her grandmother dying. He’s given her what he can of himself without scaring her, he thinks. It doesn’t seem to be enough.

He tries to tell her that this is just how he is, that this is how it has to be. It’s this or nothing. She disagrees. Loudly. She nearly spits the words at him,  _you're afraid of real intimacy, Clint._ _  
_

He doesn’t need to fight with her if she doesn’t want him anymore. That seems to upset her even more. But this is how he is; it'll always be a game. She tells him she’s sad for him, and she seems to mean it. They part as friends, but he still hides in the vents above Agent Coulson’s cube for a few days. Things always make more sense when he can listen to Coulson’s easy, decisive voice. It still hurts, though, in a vague, empty way.

He wonders which of them lost the series. Wrong sport again, but what can you do?

(Tony Stark will invite him to Wimbledon, many years later, and Clint will agree to go until he realizes that “Wimbledon” is not the name of another one of Tony’s fancy houses.)

Sex is a game, something shoved in a weird into a corner of his brain he visualizes as labeled “SPORTS,” that doesn’t touch his feelings or his heart. He takes special notice when the other agents talk about sex assignments. Not everyone does them, and Clint supposes that makes sense, if they’re not like he is, or if they’ve got someone special. That’s when he hears the word “Compartmentalization,” for the first time.

Clint’s vocabulary has expanded exponentially since he came to SHIELD, but that’s still a pretty big word. But it’s a simple concept, it’s what he’s been doing all along, basically. It makes things with Agent Tan make a little more sense. She wanted into a compartment that’s been under lock and key for a long time. Clint figures it’s just as well he’s pretty sure he left that key somewhere in Idaho on his first summer tour with the Circus.

After that, Clint is careful not to get too closely involved with anybody. It’s too complicated to keep all of the messy things in his heart to himself, when someone tries to get too close. He’s not even very good at being fuckbuddies-- he’s just the type of guy who cares about people, as much as he’s loathe to admit it. It’s easier for them to be strangers, when he feels like he needs that. Men are easier to pick up-- less likely to ask questions.

One night he’s leaving his hook-up’s apartment and he looks at the man, asleep in his bed. Clint has carefully tucked him in and left him a little note that just says “Thanks,” with a smiley face. He tries to feel something for this man. He wishes him well, hopes he has a good life and a good morning and that his parents’ dog feels better. He thinks about the compartment he should have access to. He wonders if he would be leaving right now, if his life had been different. Maybe he would have stayed overnight. Maybe they would have had breakfast. Maybe he could love this unassuming man, if things had been different.

He wonders if he could get in there, if he tried. Wonders if he will be able to let anyone else in, or if there’s only room there for Clint and his pain.

(He will eventually find that there is room there for two, then three, then six. Then he stops counting, because he’s always had a big heart; he just didn’t know how to get there.)

**Author's Note:**

> Clint *really* doesn't know much about actual tennis, so he's unaware that 15-love is not a game-end score.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [He will eventually (podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6835972) by [EllyAvon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllyAvon/pseuds/EllyAvon), [quizkwatsh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quizkwatsh/pseuds/quizkwatsh)




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